Of course, as you might expect, there’s the usual stuff mixed in with flights of fancy. A state holiday for ACT testing, because someone doesn’t want to get up early on a Saturday like the rest of the students. Demanding an ethics commission (but omitting anything about publicly funded campaigns), following our Congressional delegation’s lead on IHS funding, expanding medicaid, supporting the legalization of marijuana…..

Wait, what!?! The South Dakota Democrat Party actually adopted a resolution calling for treating pot like alcohol because “existing South Dakota marijuana laws violate the commitment to meeting every individual’s basic human rights to promote respect for diverse lifestyles and viewpoints and to live in a community without fear of discrimination.”

It’s been demonstrated that marijuana supporters could not garner the necessary number of petition signatures to put even the medical marijuana measure on the South Dakota ballot, which is a measure that could arguably have broader appeal, if it wasn’t for the fact that the “illness” rate goes up when such measures pass.

But supporting wholesale legalization is another story. That puts people such as Paula Hawks and Jay Williams as the face of a party that wants to put pot stores on main streets in every little town in South Dakota, regulating it “in a manner similar to that of alcohol.”

Such a move might garner the Democrat Party the support of those drug-using diverse lifestyle practitioners who’s support they may be seeking. But it’s going to cement the impression that modern South Dakota Democrats are a bunch of out-of-touch liberal hippies who have no relation to most South Dakota voters.

Update already! I had an observant reader suggest I google the name of the resolution author…. and let’s just say it was interesting:

Police arrested Paul and Kristina McSweeney last night, after discovering what they believe to be a growing operation in a storage area in their garage. The call initially came in as a family offense, but when police entered the home they got suspicious.

16 thoughts on “South Dakota Democrats become the “Pot Party,” claim current laws violate rights for those with “diverse lifestyles and viewpoints.” (updated)”

I may be open to medicinal use if it is closely regulated, but I’m not open to having people’s “diverse” lifestyles become legal. I’m sick of potheads acting as if they are noble, heroic, and misunderstood. If you like pot, go to Colorado; just like if you don’t like freedom, move to France or Italy-don’t try to screw up America with Hillary, Bernie, Weiland, etc.

So your solution to opposing others lifestyles is to pursue, interrogate, and incarcerate them? That’s been the strategy for 40+, when can we learn and adapt? The drug war is a war on our otherwise law abiding citizens. It has drastically eroded civil rights and is wrong on so many levels.

Stating anyone who supports a candidate you do not like must not enjoy freedom is a bizarre statement.

And if you like prescription drugs and alcohol which kills thousands of people every year, stay in SD. Instead of saying if you like pot, move to Colorado, how about if you like freedom, move to Colorado. Pot is not the problem, it’s the laws that screws up the futures of young people that is the problem.

This is where the old grey hairs have it wrong….Prohibition doesn’t work and the war on drugs is a complete failure. Those who fear legalization are completely ignorant and pushing a false agenda because they support big government. They fear what they do not know and continue to peddle the myths ingrained into their small minds by their elders.

That is a great point. So long as we have socialized all consequences for potentially harmful behavior, we have in some cases an obligation to prohibit some behaviors.

If people want individual freedom in all things, they need to also support individual consequences for individual behavior. I often contemplate all the people from my high school class who made bad decision after bad decision and when they were warned of the consequences their favorite retort was “mind your own business.” Today, because of the social safety net, their condition is “the business” of those who didn’t make those same bad decisions.

When we truly look at the actual circumstances of many of our people in need of social assistance, the mantra “through no fault of their own” just isn’t factual. To large degree, their circumstances are largely of their own doing but because we don’t know the details, they are given a pass.

Who pays a higher price in “individual consequences” than the very people you are alluding to? We incarcerate, take away education opportunities, take away voting privileges, make them pee in cups for help, all to enforce our view of what is moral. What more do you want?

Making pot smoking illegal encourages rebel teenagers to try it because it is illegal. Same thing happens to college students under 21 having knockout parties with shots of booze instead of beer parties. The highest selling liqueur in every college town is Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum; though in Colorado I doubt that is the case anymore. Full on legalization makes zero sense because the State then condones its usage; but decriminalization still keeps it on the books as a low level criminal activity and kids don’t end up thrown in jail treated like hardened criminals for a marijuana possession charge.